


Crossing the Lethe

by taranoire



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blood Magic, M/M, The Fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 14:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10362582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taranoire/pseuds/taranoire
Summary: “Take me to the warmest, safest place you know.” Hawke meets Leto in the Fade.





	

His first sense is the wind turning sour. He looks overheard (a thousand creaking ropes) at the corpses hanging from a dead tree, blackened as if by fire. He recognizes faces, rotted to bone and leather but familiar. The first man he ever killed, dangling there, a knife in his throat. Sweet Bethany, a feast of carrion, black bile. Mother–and all that remains is her head. 

He is small and helpless. A child, naked in the clawed embrace of the tree’s roots. He tries to reach for mother. The tree grows taller, gnarled branches groaning and twisting. Roots bend and creak as they pull him beneath blighted earth. The stench like rot. 

_Hawke._

He cries out, scraped and bloody, pulled deep down beneath the earth. Suffocating. His mother’s head opens its mouth and shrieks in agony. She was taken underground and hurt and tortured and twisted and melded with the flesh of other innocents to be eternal prey–she must have been so _frightened_ –

_Hawke!_

He’s in a field of white lilies. Soft perfume against his cheek. Cool beneath bare feet. They stretch on as far as his eyes can see, until they disappear beyond the horizon, a blur of silver mist and pearl. No sun here, but the field glows bronze, tranquil in its quiet. 

A voice rescued him. Pulled him from the roots of the tree. 

He is not alone. 

Facing away, there is a figure–elven, with long auburn hair blowing gently about his thin shoulders, and dressed in white and gold. Judging by his height and the timbre of his voice, he is older than a child but not quite an adult; graceful, dignified, and seeming to brim with hidden truths. There is something…familiar about him. 

“You are safe here,” the elf says. “I did not wish to meet you in a nightmare.” 

Hawke eyes him with suspicion. “You’re a spirit?” 

“Yes. And no.” 

He turns, and Hawke’s breath catches. He first notices his eyes: deep green like the arbor wilds at dusk. The elf’s features are strong, and beautiful–perhaps all the more because of how uncanny they are, the bold lines of elvhen bones. 

For a moment, Hawke forgets the dangers of spirits, and feels only a desperate longing. “Fenris?” 

The elf smiles, sad and soft. 

Hawke bristles, and stumbles to his feet. A breeze from nowhere stirs the lilies and makes them whisper. “You are a demon,” he says, and begins to muster his own magic. Here in the Fade it is pure, untainted by old sins. “Some facade wearing my lover’s face. I will not allow it. I banish you from this place.” 

But the elf does nothing. He stands there, melancholy, young and soft-eyed and conspicuously unmarked by lyrium. 

Clarity–like the rain as it washed away taint at Ostagar. “Leto?”

“I am many fragments, broken and melded,” the elf says. “I am Leto, unbound. Wisdom, unconscious. The blood of the earth singing in mortal flesh. Fenris is all of these things. When he wakes, the rest drifts back into shadow.”

“What do you want with me?” Hawke asks, guarding his mind against this strange intruder. 

“To meet you,” the elf–Leto–says. He takes a step forward and Hawke does not recoil. “I am Fenris as he was, memories that he will not recall. I have always been here. I will always remain. Something…awakened. And before I fade again, I want to know you: the man who would give everything, and ask for nothing. The man that Fenris loves.” 

He is close enough that Hawke see the details in his green eyes, glimmers of gold and brown. Normally he can sense the intentions of the spirits of the Fade, but with Leto, it is as if there are intermingling voices. Fragments upon fragments in a humming whole. 

“Prove it, then,” he says, although he already wants to believe. 

The Fade begins to change. Pearl fades to emerald; the white lilies blossom into exotic flowers. The scent of wet earth cloys. Dim shadows flicker in the periphery, engaged in slaves’ work: tilling soil, hauling water. He can hear children laughing. 

“This is a memory,” Leto says. 

A boy and a girl chase each other, darting in and out of the greenery. 

_Exspecta! Im anhelarent._

_Et? Non mihi curae est._

_Praefector!_

They drift apart. A family of three, eating supper alone by candlelight. The mother makes shadow puppets on the walls and tells stories until the children fall asleep in straw beds. The boy breaks his ankle, but does not cry, and earns a treat from the overseer. He crafts a shiv made of broken glass and clay, and slams it into another slave’s throat. 

This all comes in pieces that Desmond has never seen. 

“Are you satisfied?” 

“Show me more.” 

The Fade spins images of death, and chaos. Chanting like thunder. A thousand blurring faces, and the terror of a blade in his hand. One face in the crowd, frightening above others: an old man in silk robes, leering down, watching, always watching, tossing gold coins his way and laughing as he scrabbles to catch them.

It all goes dark. The room is made of stone, with a great cage full of rotting corpses hanging from the ceiling, dripping foul liquid in the stillness. Runes circumscribe the floor, and in the middle–

“I was killed here,” Leto says. He goes to the scaffold and stares at its chains and its straps and its black stains. His frantic screams echo, disembodied, in the walls. “Over. And over. And over. I died before that, I think; I died when I resigned my soul to him. But it was here that my body finally failed me. And it was here that I was reborn.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Leto offers little but a sad, soft smile. He beckons him.

“Come. I would know you, Desmond Hawke.” The edges of the map brighten pink and orange, unfocused, like the sun setting on the sea. “Take me somewhere I have never been. Take me to the warmest, safest place you know.” 

*

Consciousness returns warmer than summer. Sunset glows gold through high windows as candles flicker quietly, and dust glitters in the air. The Lothering chantry has always been a place of refuge for him. Safe, and quiet, and remote. The demons cannot reach him here. His sins seem far away. 

“Your faith sustains you,” Leto says, standing beside an altar. “When you taught him to read, it was from the Chant of Light. Elves are scarcely allowed in the temple, but you insisted he learn his prayers. You offered him a vision of the Maker that he did not find in the Imperium, honeyed and light. _Dominus_ taught us that elves are sin made flesh.” 

Desmond finds himself kneeling at the altar. Prayer beads encircle his hands, and he clutches the bronze symbol of Andraste within them. 

“Do you remember the first verse you taught him? The first verse he had ever heard, untouched by the apologism and manipulation of the magisters?” 

Desmond swallows. “’A dog might slink back to the hand it has bitten and be forgiven, but a slave never. If you would live, and live without fear, you must fight.’ I thought it appropriate.” 

“It was,” Leto says, thoughtfully. He looks about the chantry, green eyes drawn to the windows, to the books on the shelves. Quiet chimes resound from somewhere unseen. “You were not always a man of faith, Desmond Hawke.” 

“No,” he admits. 

“You paid for power with blood.” 

“Yes.” 

“Do you regret it?” 

They are in a dark, rotting shack in the southern wilds, a snowstorm beating the tin roof. The scent of blood cloys. Crude, used needles and the crunching bones of small animals litter the floor. He recognizes himself as a shadow, dazed and half-conscious in the corner, a leather tourniquet wrapped around his arm. Track marks and self-inflicted wounds. 

Leto gracefully kneels down before the other-Hawke. “How long?” he asks. 

Desmond looks at himself–a pathetic, broken teenager, emaciated and addicted to the flush of strength and numbness only blood magic could provide. “A few years.” 

He has told Fenris, of course, in vague euphemism. But to see it, to really see it, must be frightening. Leto reaches out to touch the specter, his purity and his warmth in stark contrast. 

“It began when my father lay bedridden from plague,” Hawke explains. “He was gone before he took his final breath. I began to wander into the wilderness for weeks at a time, leaving my family to care for him alone. I would practice entropy spells in the woods, far from the eyes of the templars and my dying father.” 

Leto listens. He trails careful fingers across the other-Hawke’s scarred arm. 

“I befriended–but that isn’t the right word. I fell in with a group of lyrium smugglers who lingered near my haunt in the wilds. In exchange for information, they gave me lyrium; when father took his last breaths I was high with it. This was enough, until it wasn’t.

“I tried to summon father. A piece of him–his voice, his face, anything. I did not expect an answer. He appeared to me, though you know–of course you know–it was not my father at all. 

“The demon promised me two things. One, that my mother would once again live in the home of her childhood, the home she longed for, and that we would know our family again. Two, that no matter what circumstances befell me, that I need never fear death–that the power of blood would be mine, and that I would shape the future of Thedas, for good or ill.” 

Leto rises and goes to Desmond. The man tries, and fails, to hold his gaze; his green eyes are beautiful and terrible, emit a holiness (and a darkness) that make him tremble and bring him to tears. He wants to sob and plead with him, with the Maker, ask that this sin–this decay–be scalded from his soul. 

“There is no demon within you, Desmond Hawke,” Leto says. “Not yet.” 

He lets out a shuddering breath. “I have not used this foul magic in years. Just once, to save y–to save him. But it is always within me. The potential. The need. At the back of my mind, every danger, any danger, can be destroyed if I am desperate enough. I am a monster.” 

He turns, and gasps–they are in a dark, wild, overgrown jungle, and the earth is soaked with blood. Cicadas screech in the stillness. Louder and louder, like human screams, echoes of what transpired moments before. Dozens of bodies sprawled across the undergrowth, faces contorted in agony. Maggots feed on their rotting flesh.

“Perhaps in that, we are alike.” 

“This is different,” Desmond says, averting his gaze from the dead. “You had no choice.” 

Leto smiles, but it is mirthless. “Did you?” 

*

He lounges on a cold riverbed, sand gritty in his trousers. The village is awash in a golden-glow, and the air is sweet with running water, honeysuckle. Crickets chirp in the reeds. 

“The first time he used me, I was fifteen,” Leto says. “I had won his little game and become the prize before I truly understood what that meant. I was frightened, and broken, and he was unforgiving.” 

The water laps at the pebbled shoreline.

“The second, I was a newly hatched bird with broken legs and clipped wings. I fought, which was not allowed, but it gratified him. And in the end, I was as willing and pliant as he instilled in me. He never let me forget he stole my innocence _twice.”_ He throws a stone into the water. It skips, and then sinks. 

“Leto,” Hawke says, and then without thinking about it, takes his hand. Such abruptness would startle Fenris, but here in the Fade everything is different. His hand is appropriately elven, fine-boned and delicate and warm. They’re his lover’s hands, even as they are not. 

“I would have given anything to have been yours,” Leto says. “In another lifetime, you might have known me as I was, before I became him. I want that. More than anything. But it is difficult to tell where I end and he begins. Knowing you now, seeing you now, is enough.” 

He tries to look down, ashamed, and Desmond knows that reaction well–when Fenris was a newborn in freedom, he had always found it hard to to meet his gaze. Desmond gently lifts his chin with his fingers, struck breathless by the vulnerable familiarity in his eyes. He presses close, and kisses him there on the shore, soft and sweet and sad. 

Leto responds as if starved of the barest human contact, open-mouthed and trembling, and Desmond weaves his fingers through his hair, clutches him more tightly as if to say _I know, I know, I know._

 _“_ Tell me anything,” Desmond says against his lips, brushing his nose against his cheek. “Tell me everything.” 

Leto considers him. Hesitates. The Fade begins to bleed away, like a painting soaked in water. “No,” he says, finally. “It would not be fair for you to know what Fenris can’t.” 

“I want to help you,” Desmond says. Lothering fades from existence, as if it were never really there. He panics, not ready to leave this place, not ready to abandon this fragment of his lover to still waters and death. “Let me!” 

“You have brought me peace enough, Desmond Hawke. You let me live for a moment in a world where I was never a slave and he never touched me. We will remember comfort and sanctuary. Feelings of reclaiming something lost, even if the details cannot breach awakening.”  

Desmond leans into him, forehead pressed to his. “I wish I could undo what he’s done to you.” 

Leto lets him go. “As do I.” 

*

He wakes with a startled, panicked gasp, then chokes on the air, coughing and sputtering as if he had been drowning. He opens his mouth, and then closes it. He scrubs his face with his hand. He blinks back tears. He doesn’t know why but he feels as if someone has died.

Fenris. 

He remembers shielding him with his body, bearing the brunt of the spell in a mad instinct to protect him. The mage who cast it lies dead, blood pooling sticky around him–the victim of a final tumble of rocks Desmond had called down, avenging them both. 

He hopes it was painful. 

Beside him, Fenris gasps, his body reacting as Hawke’s had–gagging on the air. Desmond takes him up in his arms, brushes the blood-sticky hair from his eyes. 

“I’m here,” he says. He holds him close, wary of both of their injuries. They’re alive. And that is all that matters now. That is all that will ever matter to him, in this life, or the next. He waits for him to breathe again. “What do you remember?” 

He shakes his head, closing his eyes, and for a moment Desmond thinks he’s lost him to unconsciousness. Then he speaks, voice a mere whisper. “You.” 


End file.
